Atripla, One-Pill-Once-A-Day Coctail Drug for HIV , Approved by FDA
The federal government on Wednesday approved the first HIV treatment that packs a triple-drug cocktail into a one-a-day pill.
Doctors say the salmon-colored pill will vastly simplify AIDS care and turn what a few years ago was a bothersome regimen of 20 or 30 tablets to one pill taken before bed.
To be sold as Atripla, the pill includes doses of three drugs now sold in the USA by two companies. The drugs are Bristol-Myers Squib’s Sustiva and Gilead Pharmaceutical’s Truvada, a combo of Viread and Emtriva.
Taking the trio as a single pill makes it less likely that patients will miss doses, which would allow the virus to rebound and become resistant to treatment, doctors say. Keeping the virus in check also helps lower the risk that a patient will infect someone else.
The approval also means that the drug can be made available in the developing world through the President’s Emergency Plan for AIDS Relief. Gilead is negotiating those prices with Merck, which owns the marketing rights to Sustiva outside the USA and the major countries of Europe, Bischofberger says. Both companies offer steep discounts in poor nations.
Even if the drug costs less than a dollar a dose, the price of many generics, it may be too high for many countries to afford, says Kevin DeCock, director of World Health Organization AIDS programs.
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